Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Friday, February 28, 2014

Semantics and the Illegal Settlements

On the 24th of February, I attended
a discussion on the illegality of the settlement enterprise. The purpose, to
emphasise the validity of Jewish habitation in what, depending upon your
political viewpoint, are usually referred to as the “Shtuchim ha’ k’vushim” (occupied
territories) or “agadah ha’ma’aravite” (the West Bank) or “Yehudah v’Shomron”
(Judea and Samaria).

The speaker reminded us that it is an act of
heresy to describe the settlements as anything but an obstacle to peace. Grandstanding
based on historical fictions has doomed peace talks in the past.There is no reason to believe, at least from
the public statements of politicians and religious leaders that the situation
surrounding the current talks is any different from previous negotiations.

And here is the problem.

The speaker is the editor of a right wing
Internet newspaper but even he was incapable of breaking free from our mutual
enemy’s tactics and linguistic speech patterns. And he failed to appreciate that in a war
there is only black and white. Shades of grey are rightly viewed as signs of
weakness and ruthlessly manipulated.

As an example of this attitude I read the
following day an article that was written by Dr Mustafa Barghouti and published
in Ma’ariv, the Israeli daily newspaper.He said he could not ever recognise a Jewish state because this would be
recognition of an Israeli narrative, or put another way, it would mean the
renunciation of the Palestinian narrative.That Palestinian narrative is based on distortion of religious beliefs,
denial of history, and an ideological disposition towards conquest.In fact the colonial narrative is incapable
of sharing either the past or the future and is therefore powerless to change its
direction in the present. And this, more than anything else, is the reason that
peace talks are likely doomed, to failure.

Based on an irredentist doctrine of Arab
cultural and ethno-religious homogeneity the Arab world is truly unable to
accept any narrative that differs from its own. For that reason it must
monopolize the discourse in order to delegitimize the opposing version of
events, in fact any contrary version of events.

It is against this backdrop that any objections
will be dismissed, ignored or violently opposed. Fear of dissension or any debate that veers away
from the catechism is viewed as heretical or schismatic and is crushed.This is what has nearly always characterized
Arab, Muslim and Palestinian history.

If my use of religious terminology has been noticed
I deliberately used it because submission (that or surrender is usually meant
to be the meaning of the word “Islam”) is deeply embedded in the culture of our
enemies and the ramifications of this mindset undermines and is fatal to
successful reflection or negotiation.

The only way to create an atmosphere of shared
history with all of its mutual pain is to make it unsafe not to do so.

The Temple
Mount and the Western
Wall are singularly and together, the holiest sites in the Jewish faith. On
27 June 1967, Israel’s government
formally declared the Temple Mount compound to be under Jordanian Islamic
administration which meant Israel
gave up its sovereignty in favor of the Jordanian government.What makes this singular act remarkable is
that Israel remained in a
state of war with Jordan for
twenty seven years after this date (until the signing of a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994).To this
day this act of self-denial remains unique, unprecedented in human history.Denying itself the mantle of sovereignty was more than an act of generosity by a conquering
nation.Against a setting of Muslim-Arab
ethnic cleansing that included the desecration and destruction of almost all of
ancient Jewish Jerusalem the decision by Moshe Dayan to ignore the physical
destruction and ethnic cleansing by Israel’s Arab enemies appears
saintly by comparison.And it continues
to psychically burn many on the right of Israeli politics as if the
proclamation of non-sovereignty remains a suppurating wound to this day.

A member of the Israeli Knesset organized the
first ever Knesset debate on the subject of Jewish rights on the Temple Mount
on the 25th of February 2014. Jordan informed Israel that “attacking places which
are holy to Islam will ignite a diplomatic conflict between the countries”.

Here is the issue in a single sentence.The Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and
his Arab brethren deny any connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem. They deny the
evidence of more than 3,000 years of continuous Jewish habitation in Jerusalem.Or they destroy it.It is irrelevant whether this aberrant mental
tic is a negotiating tactic or a grotesque display of genuine ignorance. Any
negotiation that is not based on a priori mutual recognition is doomed to fail.

Part of that mutual recognition must involve
the renunciation of the war of words but propaganda is meant to score points,
not negotiate an equitable peace and once we adopt the language of our enemies
we have already lost the argument, if not the war.

The only way we can change the course of this
debate is to reclaim the “moral” high-ground. So I lay out a few facts that
need to be repeated by our diplomats, by our politicians and by all of us, at
every possible opportunity:

In
1948 the indigenous Jews of Palestine as well as immigrant Jews to Palestine were ethnically cleansed from Judea and Samaria

In
1948 the indigenous Jews of Palestine as well as immigrant Jews to Palestine were ethnically cleansed from the ancient
City of Jerusalem.

The
persecution that Christians are suffering today as a consequence of Arab
religious bigotry was the fate of Jews throughout Arab history and
culminated in the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Arab lands in 1948. They
travelled overwhelmingly to the only country in the region that offered
them safety and the opportunities offered by self-determination and that
country was and remains to this day, Israel.

As
a consequence of points one through three, the Nakba exists but it was the
rejectionism of Muslim nationalists and religious figures throughout the
Muslim world that created the momentum for it.In terms of scope that Nakba was Jewish
and those that take only an Arab narrative view of events are racists.

The
West Bank did not ever exist until Jordan
captured Judea and Samaria
in 1948 and illegally annexed it in the same year. The term was created to
differentiate the West Bank of the Jordan River from the East Bank of the Jordan River and served to create a border between
the two parts of the nascent Jordanian ‘empire.’

70%
of Jordanians are Palestinian but following on from point five, that 70%
excludes “West Bank” Palestinians.

Islamic
antisemitism as well as Islamic anti-Christian belief are both doctrinally
anchored in the primary texts of Islam.

This
prejudice is not therefore a foreign Christian or Western import, nor
is it the result of Israeli self-determination in Palestine.Church massacres and the desecration of
Jewish as well as other faith’s holy sites have taken place throughout
Islamic history and will continue to occur world-wide because the Islamic
world refuses to acknowledge the original sin of its theological
malevolence and aggression.The
Koran and the Hadith refer to Jews as apes and pigs, and there is far
worse extracted from the Muslim holy texts. Jews that refuse to embrace the only true
faith can be killed, quickly or slowly.The Muslims that perpetrated the Mumbai Massacre in 2008 made that
point only too clearly when they tortured to death a woman in the late
stages of her pregnancy.

In spite of all this horror, Jews
are favoured in their treatment compared to ‘heretics’ and ‘idolaters’.

“Be
you apes, despised and loathed.” Jews
and Christians are equated with pigs which are loathed by Muslims.
Ridicule is central to demonization and delegitimization.

Massacres
such as occurred in Hebron in 1929, Jaffa in 1936, and Kfar Etzion in 1948 reinforced the
contempt that Arabs already had for Jewish rights in Palestine. The denial by Abbas and his
ilk of Jewish history is consistent with Muslim and Arab cultural
terrorism. The theft of classical history is an Islamic tactic used to reject
both Jewish and Christian land based ties to the holy land and to anchor
Muslim – Arab conquest as firmly in the past to justify the present, as is
possible.

If
the Koran is not logically consistent, this is also useful as
inconsistencies are used to ‘prove’ the peaceful nature of the faith while
ignoring any calls to violence, bigotry and hate that are also integral to
a conquest based Muslim world view.

Article
49 of the 4th Geneva Convention involves forced transfers of
populations into or out of occupied territories.Judea and Samaria are contested territories and
forced, mass expulsions have not taken place.

The
United Nations Organisation has been the propaganda arm of the OIC
(Organisation of the Islamic Conference) in its continued war against the
Jews for almost four decades and Article 49 of the 4th Geneva
Convention proves the point. Turkey
is
guilty of repeated violations of the 4th Geneva
Convention in both its conquest of North Cyprus
and its forced population transfers. But the UN has remained completely
silent on this.

And
finally, with reference to the alleged illegality of the Settlements, Oslo 2 gave Israel unrestricted building
rights in Area C.If the Arab World
is so contemptuous of any treaty obligations then why should Israel
ever trust its neighbours with whom it has been in mortal combat in modern
times, for over a century?This
obsession with Israel
resettlement reinforces the belief that any treaties signed with a Muslim
state are no more than one more stage in a war that is only permitted to
end in Islamic victory. In theological terms this is referred to as Dar
al-Hudna (a treaty signed between Muslim and non-Muslim nations with the
intent that it serves only as a respite).

There will always be the apologists who
proclaim that you do not learn about a religion by examining the conduct of its
followers.They will warn you that “true
faith” is based on the scriptures and the lessons that should be learnt from
embracing them. With respect to those who think this, much of human history is a
response to what we as human beings have taken from religious texts. And that
interpretation is an ongoing conversation between human beings and not deities
and their followers.

If we excuse the behaviour of the conqueror and
the slave master instead of demanding a full account of their actions then
civilisation is no longer a conversation. It is no longer a thing of hope and
love; both a terrible historical journey and a beautiful opportunity for growth
and development. Instead it is a cursed thing that can only ever celebrate
pain.And that is something that civilised
people refuse to believe.Hope for a
better future is part of our Western tradition and we must not forget it.

In the Western World we have the extremist, fascist
Left which will always sycophantically accept the obliteration of our history
in favour of the Islamic (Arab) narrative because of its own logical
inconsistencies.If the Muslim world is
portrayed as “victims” of Western Imperialism and not collaborators (or worse)
instigators and perpetrators of great evil then that Muslim nation must have
its terrible enemy.The fascist Left
would collapse under the weight of its antisemitism if its choices – its
contradictions could not be explained away by reference to the ongoing conflict
with the Zionist occupation.

Perpetual peace is no empty idea,
but a practical thing which, through its gradual solution, is coming always
nearer its final realization..." Immanuel Kant

We will not achieve peace of any
kind while an Islamic – Arab narrative continues to demand our fidelity to a
false tale of Islamic tolerance and peaceful co-existence. That tolerance is a
myth and peace has not ever existed except through obeisance. Until we
recognize this sad fact and until we shout it from the rooftops the Muslim
world will continue to use us as its whipping boy. It will blame us for all of
its crimes and the world will continue to ignore its inhumanity.

The Islamic migration to the West
is based on a narrative of faith based peace and tolerance. I have read of
Muslim conditional tolerance but rarely have I read of Islamic peace.

In the Western World they have
the attention and the obedience of our intellectuals and most journalists.Governments fear offending their Muslim
constituent’s and will always be loathe to cause offense to the wider 1,500 million
strong, Muslim market.They have
economic levers based on oil and demographics. We cannot impact the demographics
and journalists are mostly careful – they rarely behave in a way that
antagonizes their Muslim hosts (they have never feared Jewish reprisals).That leaves us with the war of information.

Israel
must encourage its Palestinian adversaries to accept Jewish prior sovereignty
and the fact that the earlier sin of Arab conquest does not validate its claims
against Israel’s.

We are the enemy so let them fear
what we can say about their conduct towards us.The Arab and greater Muslim nation will not thank the Palestinians for being
the reason that we demolish their carefully crafted deceptions if we repay some
of their most outrageous crimes by publicly denouncing their continued
assault on all of us at every opportunity.

2 comments:

Very well written. Lets see you preach this to the Left, specially in Israel, for they are the source of all the problems with the so called "Palestinians". by not even willing to listen to any of the reasons you have indicated above and by accepting the Arab narrative and language.

Like all democratic nations Israel needs a viable, effective opposition or it will fall into corruption and demise. Traditional right - left or right - social democrat politics are a necessity for democratic good health. The Left has floundered since Begin came to power in 1977. That is an awfully long time to be failed. Both the system of coalitions and the awakening and expression of ultra-orthodox religious power has hugely complicated and destabilized democratic politics in Israel. Until these areas are seriously addressed the Left is lost.